welcome!

Shout out to Ryan!  I'm glad to have you along.  And, I'm interested to see on your blog that under "your best friend is" you list The Lord of the Rings.  I've read some LOTR bashes in recent months and it's awesome to know you're a fan :)

Out, out, damn sentence!

Writing. Some of us do it because we have to (I’m not the only writer to be marched to the computer by a character holding a gun to my head); some do it because it’s a fun, creative diversion; some do it because it pays the bills. We all get stuck on sentences and paragraphs. I’ve learned a few things from fighting with ideas and words.

a) Pay attention to your inner editor. I believe most, if not all, writers have one. It often starts out as a quiet voice but mine got louder the more I critiqued (or “critted”) other people’s chapters while continuing to work on my own story.

If something sounds awkward to your inner editor -- it just won’t behave by pouring itself nicely into a coherent sentence or two, or it hits some bumps as the words roll along -- there’s probably something wrong with it. Go back to it and think about it. Twist things around, look for something that flows with the rest of the paragraph. For myself, sometimes I decide that the reason I can’t seem to fix it is because it doesn’t have to be there anyway. A day or two later, I go back and read the same chapter, and I realize the rhythm is better without the troublesome phrase and I haven’t lost any important information.

Very often, the same phrases I have doubts about but leave in are the ones that my crit buddies on Critique Circle say need tweaking. They’re nice about it, but what they mean is, “Nooo, that’s like fingernails on a blackboard.” That reinforces my editing instincts. I had no idea when I started posting chapters to be critted that the process would become so central to my writing.

b) If you have a thought (sentence, phrase) that sounds great but doesn’t seem to click with the rest of the paragraph, maybe it doesn’t belong either. The parts of my WIP that other people say worked great are the ones I didn’t have to struggle to put together. I know how you feel.  The words fit together like puzzle pieces and say something in a clever way, but: they don’t belong. In this instance, writing is not like gardening where you can uproot something and find another corner where it works better. I look at it this way. Every time I have to make a writing decision that I know is good for the story but is painful, it toughens my skin. I’m gonna need that the more I ask people to comment on my writing.

It’s an interesting dynamic going on in my head. I have a Movie Director who controls what I see as I write. I’ve had to admit that the Director doesn’t always know what he’s doing. It was the painful admission of a writer beginning to show her work to others. My Inner Editor, I think, argues with the Script Writer. Combine that with characters changing the plot midstream and you have an answer to why writers often seem confused and some are going bald.

A Miscellany

I've added a new poem/song, "Season of Fire", to the poems/songs page.  Neal wrote it and tells me he's not 100% satisfied with it, but said it's okay for me to use it here  ;-)  My Muse wants to work it into the novel but unless there's a really good reason to include it, it may just stay here on the blog.  Neal also tells me he wants to go back to writing more often in Spanish, poems included.  My Muse, however, doesn't know Spanish so I can feel mistranslations coming!

I'm a bit late with this, but I have to shout out Congrats to the Buffalo Sabres for winning hardware at the recent NHL awards in Las Vegas.  Goalie god Ryan Miller won the Vezina for the league's top goaltender, and was tapped for the NHL Foundation Award for his work in the community.  (Remember, he was also instrumental in the U.S. Olympic hockey team's win of the silver medal.)  He's raised more than $500,000 for his charity the Steadfast Foundation, which emphasizes helping cancer patients, especially childhood forms.  Thanks to the NHL for donating $25,000 to the Steadfast Foundation.

Defenseman Tyler Myers took home the Calder Trophy as Rookie of the Year.  He won in a landslide, with 400 more points than the runner-up.  Tyler led all rookies with 37 goal assists.  He's got a solid, excitable fan group in the Buffalo area.

Other trophies and awards were given out of course, but these are the most meaningful to me.  As Ryan noted, Buffalo hockey fans are rabid, and when we're happy, we scream!  Best wishes for the coming season to Ryan and Tyler, standouts on a pretty cool team.  :-D

By the way, Buffalo did feel Ontario's earthquake last week.  It was first estimated at a 5.5 but later downgraded to a 5.0.  I, alas, did not feel a thing.  My sister and I were grocery shopping at the time and may have been driving when the waves actually passed through.  I feel so cheated!  ;-)  I have felt a couple tiny quakes before, but sheesh.  I live on the edge of one of the Great Lakes and I've never seen a waterspout either.  The stuff I miss . . . well Murphy may be listening so I'll shut up about that.

A last note of sympathy and love to the thousands affected by the oil spill.  I have a small sense of how you're hurting and my heart bleeds for you.  I'm so sorry that money became more important than your livelihoods.  And to the people of Haiti, still in pieces after the monster quake and living in terror of the current hurricane season, how I wish I could scoop you all up and put you gently into real homes in a good community.  May the Universe soon ease the suffering of all these people, and animals who have no way to speak for themselves.

New pages

I've added a new page for poems, or as I sometimes think of them, failed songs.  ;)  I like to keep my Muse fresh by daring her to do poetry in and around working on my novel-in-progress (Street Glass).  Poems and songs usually need to get ideas across with a minimum number of words, and learning how to compress my meaning is useful for fiction writing.  And, it's just fun.  My poetry would probably make English lit majors cringe, as much for format as anything else.  I've never "studied poetry" so don't expect anything formal.

The first entry, "Three Words", doesn't have an especially positive mood but I like certain aspects of it.  I'll include new entries intermittently.  Some of them may wind up in Street Glass, probably in altered forms, but mainly the entries are just exercises.  I'm debating the wisdom of posting a poem here that I intend to include in my novel.  We'll see.

And because I've finally realized that people may visit my blog who are not members of Critique Circle, I'm going to include a page explaining Street Glass: what the basic premise is, who the major characters are, stuff like that.  If I could draw, I'd include drawings of the players too.  Like many writers I suspect, I can see some of my characters crystal-clear in my head.  I wish I knew a police artist, I bet they could help me with pictures of these people.

My part-time Census job is finally over!  Woo-hoo!  More time to write!!

The mystery of creating

So I’ve written that scene where Neal gets the bad news about the kids and women. It needs tinkering but of course it’s only a first draft. Writing is funny, has anybody noticed that?

As I wrote, Neal made an offhand comment -- that maybe Sandy would write a song about the tragedy and thereby keep alive the memory of the murdered people -- that my Muse threw into her Magickal Crockpot. It simmered for two or three weeks, then boiled over one night as I was trying to stay asleep. Funny how the Crockpot tends to boil over nights when I have an early shift at work the next day. These two lines floated to the top and would not go away. I saw that dawn was seeping across the sky. Two more lines floated up. They seemed to click right together with the first two, rhyming and fitting with a rhythm. As most writers know, once that happens, you are doomed. You can’t ignore the Muse’s clicking, even if you want to. (Although, really, what writer wants to?)

Worse, I began to hear the lines sung. I heard a chorus; it was just a couple short lines with the first one repeated at the end. The weird thing is that it was Sandy’s voice. There is no way I could confuse it with anybody else’s voice, no real performer. As I wrote the words, the voice got stronger. I didn’t get a whole song, just a couple verses and that chorus, but it sounded like somebody was singing in my ear. It was the most obvious thing in the world to hear that tune with those words. Of course it flowed this way, that was its natural pattern.

This happened once before, in grade school. And, now that I think about it, that was also one of Sandy’s songs. That one I got in one piece, verses, chorus, complete melody, voice in my head. I wrote the lyrics down but time was cruel and saw to it that I lost the paper. I still remember the chorus though. Because I never learned anything about songwriting (like how to write music) I can’t write the melody for either of these songs. That’s my greatest frustration. I suppose I could make a simple vocal recording of the more recent song, “Flood of Tears”, but I’ve never had voice training either and I’m sure that not even my car likes to hear me sing.

Oh and the singing is accompanied by solo piano too. The tune wanders a bit between verses but not too far, like somebody improvising and not straying much from the basic melody. It’s all in my head. I can only get the words out on paper but of course the melody is perhaps more than half of what makes a song. Ah, to be a full-fledged songwriter, capable of getting all the details out there.

I tell myself that despite my shortcoming with songwriting, I still am blessed by my Muse. Not everybody has a Muse or is able to translate what that Muse is trying to say. It’s a wonderful thing to see people who don’t exist, hear conversations that never happened, see how made-up events fit together like a picture made of falling dominoes, get a sense of what makes people tick as you explore the interactions of people you can never physically touch. I used to write sci fi/fantasy and even aliens will help you understand humans. I wonder if a lot of psychologists write fiction.

Here’s to my Muse, whose name, by the way, is Sarah. Don’t let her commonplace name fool you. After all no one can write off a Muse.

Blinking into that other world

I forget where I was this morning, but I was waiting for something and looked idly out the window. I saw a freight truck with “Panther” emblazoned across the side. Oh, thought I, that might make a great name for a music label, or maybe a tour promoter group, or maybe an album/CD. I’ve always been intrigued by words, as I suppose many writers are. Since I’ve thrown myself heedlessly into my novel, though, I seem to have gotten swallowed by words.

It’s the whole story immersion thing. I’m always -- and I mean always -- thinking about my characters and the story, often unconsciously. Bits of otherwise nonexistent scenes pop into my head while I’m at work or tooling down the road, sometimes with such startling clarity that I catch my breath. Recently something got me thinking about where it would be best to end the story; I had one end point in mind but have begun to think I might need to extend it to wrap up properly.

Abruptly I dropped into the middle of a conversation Neal was having with a woman, whose daughter may or may not be his. I can see Neal as clearly as I see this laptop. I’ve known about the woman (Maria) and the girl for some months now but this scene was unexpected. She said something about her boyfriend possibly abusing the little girl. Her boyfriend came into the room and Neal rounded on him, stalking right up to the guy’s face.

“You touched that little girl? You put a hand on her? What did you do to her?”

Understand that this scene happens some four years after the novel starts. Neal’s been through a lot of ups and downs in those years and has put the loss of his four kids mostly behind him. This has brought everything back. His friends mean the world to him but blood family has always been the most special. Watching his friends with their own families makes the loss of his own that much harder. In one short span of time, he meets a man who says he’s Neal’s biological father (who is obviously a miserable excuse for a human being) and a teenager who says he’s Neal’s half-brother. Now he might have a daughter. To say he feels protective and possessive is the understatement of the decade.

“You again?” Jorge stood at least two inches taller and stared evenly at Neal.

“I said, what did you do to her?”

Jorge’s dark eyes dared him to do something. “What’s it to you?”

That sounded like an admission. His fist connected with Jorge’s jaw and sent him sprawling to the floor.

“Stop it,” Maria shouted.

In case she was planning on pulling Neal away, he threw himself at Jorge.

-- It fades here. This is what keeps me writing, it’s my drug rush; those half-scenes where “people” are really alive can make everything else completely disappear.

Several years ago, I indulged in some fan fiction online. The woman who gave me the most encouragement said, “If you see it, write it.” That’s got to be some of the best writing advice ever given. I haven’t finished the scene where Neal finds out his older kids have been murdered, but it’s never good to keep a muse waiting.

Live and let die

So I have to write a scene that wasn’t in previous versions of my Work In Progress. By leaving his life in the streets, Neal made a conscious decision to break contact with the women he sometimes slept with and who gave birth to his kids. He didn’t feel a strong enough attachment to them to override his need to change his life.

Now, please don’t write him off as an insensitive bastard. He happens to be a bastard but that’s a different issue ;-) I’m talking about life with a street gang. Shoot or be shot kind of thing. I’ve done reading on the subject, and it seems to be true that these guys think of women as property more than life partners. If I’m substantially wrong, I hope somebody will correct me and provide proof.

Anyway. His ex-gang tries to off him, the attempt fails. He finds out that, against his expectations, they’ve gone after his kids and their mothers. This is one of the many lessons Neal’s taught me: just because you live in the streets, does not automatically mean you are a waste of humanity. Realizing that *his family* got blown away because of him, and that those kids will never grow up, hits him the way it would hit anybody. In basic terms, he took the women and the kids for granted and now realizes what he’s lost.

But this will be the first time I write the scene where he gets the news. In order for it to be realistic, I have to feel his pain as much as he does. I did write another scene, set a couple years past this point, where Neal’s girlfriend dies in a house fire.  He knows she's upstairs and his friends stop him from looking for her because the top floor is on fire.  I listen to rock music while I write and Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara” was on as I wrote that. I had to stop several times and let the velvety music soothe me. It got worse: the computer ate my first draft. Since I use my sister’s computer and she takes control of “Stanley” in the evenings, I got out my notebook and my pen and geared up to write the whole scene a second time.

The song stayed in my head and helped me recreate the mood, but wow, that was not fun. And it’s still in first draft form. Now I get to describe what it’s like to find out your little kids and their mothers have been blown away because you crossed a line. Neal’s not a normal sort of guy, otherwise I’d have a boring story. His mother ran off when he was ten and his father (his mother’s husband, anyway) died before that. He has vague memories of other kids who might have been siblings, but he suspects other relatives removed them. He’s used to not having blood family. The gang took over where relatives left off. While that gave him a sense of loyalty, it also taught him to take what he wanted and keep other people at arm’s length. Plus, at this point in the story, he’s only 18.

So, he realizes the kids are gone forever and he’s lost the only blood relatives he had. He has a new life now but no roots. He left the gang, turned his back on them, so he knew he could never go back. Wiping out the kids, though, is a viciousness he didn’t expect. It’s personal now.

If future blogs are written in a weepy voice, have some sympathy for both of us. Every time I edit, the poor characters experience it all over again, just like me. Putting him through the loss of his kids once may make both of us cry, but of course I’ve got to tweak it and twist it and go over it until it’s right.

How do you deal with writing painful scenes? Is this how the stereotype of the drunken writer got started? Talk to me about writing sorrow and what it does to you.